Dictation systems that capture speech input from a user for subsequent transcription are widely used to facilitate data entry in a variety of industries, including the health care, legal and media industries. For example, in the health care field, doctors and other medical professionals often dictate notes regarding patients in response to a patient encounter such as a patient visit, a medical procedure performed on the patient, diagnostic analysis of patient data, etc. As another example, an attorney may dictate a memorandum or a brief (or a portion thereof) to be added to the appropriate electronic record for the associated legal matter. Independent of the field of endeavor, the dictation, once captured, is then typically transcribed (e.g., by a human transcriptionist, using automatic speech recognition, or a combination of both) and entered into or otherwise associated with the corresponding electronic record.
Special purpose transcription services have been developed and deployed that allow a user to call-up the service and begin dictating. For example, when a physician completes an interaction with a patient, the physician can call the transcription service and begin dictating information about the interaction with the patient to be stored in an electronic record associated with the patient. The audio received by the transcription service may be accessed by a transcriptionist who listens to the audio and transcribes the audio into text. Some transcription services utilize automatic speech recognition (ASR) to automatically transcribe the audio. When ASR is used, a transcriptionist is often still employed to review the automated transcription to correct any errors that may have resulted.
Such transcription services presently allow a user to call-in from any number of different devices, including land lines and mobile devices such as cellular telephones. Thus, audio received by a dictation service may originate from a wide variety of sources and may be dictated in different environmental contexts, and therefore may vary greatly in quality.